Professor Christine Wells is the founding Director of the University of Melbourne Centre for Stem Cell Systems. She is the deputy program leader for Stem Cells Australia, an ARC funded $21M special research initiative to bring together leading Australian stem cell scientists.  Christine is a genome biologist interested in tissue injury and repair. She leads a program of research in biological data integration and visualization for the stem cell community, including method development leading to gene discovery and characterization of stem cell subsets and innate immune cells.

Professor Wells has published over 92 scientific journal articles, in the leading scientific literature, including landmark studies in mapping gene architecture and function. She has developed several open source software programs, including the Stemformatics.org stem cell collaboration resource, which has a global audience, and which hosts the largest compendium of curated stem cell data. This resource is used to generate definitive molecular signatures of stem cell subsets and their differentiated progeny, including accurate classification of MSC from different tissues. Over the last 16 years, Christine has worked with the Japanese genome consortium, FANTOM, led from the RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies (CLST), Yokohama, on discovery of the genetic toolkit used by cells and tissues during development, growth, aging and disease.